Amazing how Skype went from a verb to the shadow realm. MS could’ve done so much more.
Would seem almost intentional given the size and success of the company. How do you fuck something like that up so badly? Seems like one of those Embrace, Extend, Extinguish deals or similar
Skype was always shit. It was being first to market that made it popular. It was one of the first ways to get cheaper and free informational calling. By the time MS purchased it vent and ts became popular as well as zoom and others entering the space.
I agree with you here. They just never kept up with what people wanted or needed out of a communications platform. When Discord showed it was more versatile nearly 10 years ago, my whole group switched and never looked back.
Skype call sounds still bring specific kinds of nostalgia though.
They treated it as an extension of the telephone is how I always thought about it.
Good point, they never really got past that, huh
Good ol capitalism breeding innovation. And then acquiring the innovation, cloning it poorly and killing it off so the market has no access to the product and service they wanted. Innovative!
Dumbasses.
Teams has a lot of Skype references under the hood…
Well yeah “shutting down” here is more like “absorbed” into teams. They don’t make “enough” money from consumers to keep it going, but they do from their teams subscriptions. The tech is and will further be ported to teams and the branding changed.
Remember to break this news gently to your elderly parents.
Skype is what I usually use to video chat with them but I recently got my mom to download Signal, which is nice
Wait…MICROSOFT owns skype??? Was this always the case, or did they do something stupid where they bought skype during the heyday, and immediately tank it just a few years before the pandemic? Because Zoom really had a field day in 2020.
So, which is it? Did they always own it, or were they a buyer of an established skype that tanked it like Verizon did with tumblr? Or that other company did with myspace?
They’ve owned it since 2011. When they did buy it, they had Lync, which sucked pretty bad. Now they have Teams, probably the result of merging Lync and Skype.
Now they have Teams, probably the result of merging Lync and Skype.
And the resulting horror show is just as bad as you’d imagine to :/
My father, who worked for a huge computer manufacturer, was one approached by two young dudes asking for a server for their new startup. He listened to their proposition but couldn’t see how they were going to stay in business, so he turned them down and they went elsewhere for their hardware.
This was the two founders of Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, some 20 years ago.
Your dad after hearing Skype will shut down: “FINALLY!!! This nightmare can finally end.”
